June 9th, 2013, 5:49 PM
Jacobin sent his senses out and listened to the echo. He could feel the push and pull of metal, sense the location of every cache of iron in the district. Sensing was easy; long-range manipulation was harder; he knew the force he could exert was limited by the distance, but this new plan would make it much easier.
He felt a brief twinge of guilt and then shook his head. All he had to do was look. The buildings had cobwebbed, empty windows, already cracked and rotted. The asphalt was greasy, oily, smelled of cars in need of repairs and men in need of sobriety. The only inhabitants of the fifth district were the scavengers, the thieves, and the desperately poor. For three years, Pyre had been demanding more and more in tribute, desperately trying to squeeze his stones for blood.
“I’ll give him blood,” murmured Jacobin.
The only things still in good condition were (a) one building, with sloping walls carefully designed to resist gunfire and no windows, (b), the anti-air guns on top of the building, presumably loaded with armor-piercing rounds in case of superheroes, and (c) the old levy drones standing guard outside, which at least had fresh coats of paint so Pyre wouldn’t see the dents that no mechanist working for him was skilled enough to fix.
He measured the distance precisely. Almost exactly equidistant. The guns on the drones pointed towards him, and with a wave of his hand he crushed the two of them together. There was a small explosion.
He took one step forwards, and crushed the anti-air guns.
He took one more step directly towards Pyre’s fortress-bunker, and Luminosa appeared. One last time.
His eyes narrowed.
“Get out of my way.”
“This is your last chance,” she said quietly. “We can work together. Or you can be a supervillain.”
“Get out of my way.”
She crossed her arms. “Why are you attacking his bunker?”
“No more delays. No more soldiers. I’m going to kill him now.”
“More likely,” she suggested, “he’ll burn you alive. Or the guards inside will shoot you.”
“Maybe.” His eyes narrowed. “Taking out his guards wasn’t exactly quiet. Shouldn’t he be coming out?”
“He’s a bit busy dealing with the fact that I welded his front door shut,” she said casually.
They could both hear muffled thumps from inside, then the roar of flame.
“Also his back door.”
“Why?” he asked.
“Why what? Why am I trying to save you after you broke with me? Because I try to save everybody.”
“Not me,” he said. “I don’t need saving. Why haven’t you just incinerated him and moved on! I thought you were a hero!”
She blinked, and was behind him. “I could kill him.”
Beside him. “But I won’t.”
Facing him, again. “Because I try to save everyone.”
“He’s murdered dozens of people!”
“Don’t be provincial. He’s killed hundreds of people,” she said. “At least eighty victims in the United States before he came here, probably more. I suspect he killed at least another one hundred and thirty indirectly via criminal negligence and more from the indirect effects of dehousing, and that’s not even counting the number of people he didn’t save. As supervillains-turned-aristocrats go, he’s one of the worst.”
“So you’re letting me do your dirty work, just so you can keep your hands clean?”
“Oh no, the reason we’re having the conversation is because I wanted his servants to know they could still get out by the side door. The one on the other side from you,” she added helpfully. “But I don’t have any powers that affect other people that don’t involve lasers and so I can’t stop you without killing you, so diplomacy is my only option to slow you down.”
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“Then stand aside.”
He pressed a hand to the back of his neck, and his costume changed colors; black from top to bottom, except for three bars on the forehead. Three vertical stripes, blue, white, and blue.
“The revolution starts now.”
She laughed at him, suddenly, incongruously, a single bark before she could suppress it. His face hardened.
“The junkyard on 17th and 46th.”
“Yes?”
He extended his left arm, and brought it down like the arc of a clock’s hand, and, again in an arc of constant radius from his center of mass, a car flew from the junkyard and landed on top of Pyre’s palace with a smashing of steel, sending a spray of scraps skittering across the concrete roof.
“Again,” he said, and again, and again, a rain of metal descended, cars and radiators and robot parts landing in a constant barrage on Pyre’s fortress.
She said something, and he ignored her as more and more metal scraps built up, on it, denting it, surrounding it, not noticing when she vanished, until finally he, intent, held out his hands like a child molding clay, brought them together, and twisted. The shards of metal bent and broke and boiled under the pressure of his grip, wrapped around the fortress, covering it completely in a sheet of molten steel and iron.
He intertwined his fingers and clapped the heels of his hands together, and the metal pushed against the concrete, and, with an awful noise, Pyre’s bunker, no longer looking anything like a palace, crunched inwards.
He raised his hands, breathing hard with exertion as the bunker lifted up, and twisted the palace in them, grinding it together until the county seat of the fourth district could be condensed no more, and then he carefully lowered it to the ground.
He noticed, over the ringing in his ears, that there were alarms going off and fire hydrants erupting and people shrieking, and then he took off flying until he stood precisely equidistant between the giant ball of concrete wrapped in metal and the royal palace.
Then he, standing at the fulcrum of the lever of his power, brought his arm around in another great wheel and hurled Pyre’s bunker at the Titanium Tyrant.
- - -
An imaginary viewer, who would presumably had to have X-ray vision in order to see through the various walls, would be able to watch from across the street as Victoria Ward dialed the twenty-digit number into her not-quite-a-cell-phone and waited for the click as, on the other end, there was an answer. Presumably.
“This is Delia. Can Cici come to the phone?”
There was a pause. Presumably, someone on the other end of the phone was saying something.
“Everything’s delightful here.”
Absent any audience, Victoria’s face was completely blank, her lips only twitching slightly to shape the sound of her voice.
“Yes, Cici, this is the regular check-in. Nothing new has come up since Ash. Everything’s been quiet enough. The kid’s been making noise, but we haven’t caught him yet. Your brother’s a brat, but that’s nothing new.”
Sounds emitted from the device, too quiet to hear, and Victoria laughed down in her chest.
“We shouldn’t need to take over the job for at least another month, possibly closer to the big show. I don’t think I’ll have much to say until my rivals start squabbling.
“Yes, I’m sure I’ll get the job. I thought I’d have to worry about Trina, but she made it very public she didn’t want it. We shouldn’t have to bring in any consultants until it all gets going.”
There was another pause. Victoria glanced down to her hand, looked at the palm. The scars were almost invisible, by now.
“No, we shouldn’t need any more of the crew yet.”
The voice continued to twitter, and Victoria shook her head as she listened. The movement was unconsciously exaggerated.
“You worry too much, Cici. There’s risk in any career, of course, but everything -”
Something flew past Victoria’s window, which she did not see, because when she was conspiring with her mysterious backers she did not leave her window open for anyone to spy in.
“Ought to be -”
The world was wrenched. The floor shook, along with the rest of the island, a massive force tearing at the foundations of the world, followed by a crash, which might have suggested to an educated ear the possibility that a giant concrete bunker wrapped in iron had collided with a force field, bounced off and burst, smashing a path of destruction through moderately affluent neighborhoods.
“I’m sorry, Cici, but that sounds like my day job. I’ll have to call you back.” Disconnect. It would take her precious time to armor up. She might miss him - no, she wanted the armor; not only was it magnetically shielded, but there was not a bit of iron in it, only advanced, expensive modern alloys.
It was one of the newer models designed so one person could put it on. Changing clothes from her Victoria work outfit into the tight bodysuit made to interface took long moments by her internal clock, which she had no success in adjusting to the rest of the world’s speeds. The armor opened up, unfolding for her; she stepped into it, then went through the checks. Left foot mobility, one hundred percent. Left foot diagnostic, positive. Right foot mobility, diagnostic. Arm power, one hundred on both, full mobility. Left AP blade, right AP blade, positive. Shoulder-mounted lasers, positive, full power, fire low-power beams - all working smoothly, accuracy full. Railgun, ready. Both of the whip-blades.
Then she was running down the stairs.
She shifted to Nicator’s voice. “No-one, we’re under attack.” It came out in a snarl.
- - -
The bustle surrounded Melissa, but she didn’t have anything in particular to do. Just stay put and stay listening.
“They’re all dead,” she heard. The voice was unfamiliar. Not much emotion on the surface, but there was anger bottled up in the harmonics below...
“That’s him,” she said.
Boots on the floor. She’d heard the buzzing of insects; they hadn’t bothered to clean up the dried blood, or even move the bodies of the dead - though the scavengers, human and non-, had taken care of those. There was a crunch of insect carapaces as the unknown person stepped through them.
She flipped the switch and a container hissed open, barely audible to her ears.
She pushed the intercom. “Number one? We’ve found him.”